I don’t always do wonderful people on their birthdays. I do terrible people too like John Wilkes Booth a couple of weeks ago. But at least Booth was young and very possibly psychotic. Today, I’m going to talk about that great villain who wrote the words we all learned in grammar school:
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!
That’s right, Patrick Henry was born on this day in 1736. And he was passionate about liberty. Well, he was passionate about the liberty of rich white men like himself. Hey, come to think of it, he was a modern day libertarian! I’ll admit, my main problem with him is that he was a slave owner and I just think that slavery is such a no-brainer, especially in the United States where it was explicitly racist. You couldn’t have white slaves in the 18th century, so they must have figured out that if you are a whole man (instead of only three-fifths), slavery was wrong.
He wasn’t born to slavery. Like modern libertarians, he was just willing to twist all logic into knotts in order to justify his own privilege. So he married into slavery and then bought more and more slaves. Life, you see, was not so sweet as to be purchased at the price of slavery, but life was very sweet when you practiced slavery. Rock on! Long live the rich white man!
But what really bugs me is that school children are told about this “great man” when he was against our very own Constitution (as are most modern libertarians). But then finally, he supported the Federalist Party, because they were the aristocratic party. No champion of the common man he!
It is not surprising at all that the conservative evangelical Christian Patrick Henry College took its name from him. He wasn’t especially known as a Christian. He was just a rich white man who used fear of slave and Indian revolts to push for revolution. Good choice guys! Your college is a true testament to your namesake.
Happy birthday to the awful, liberty-hating Patrick Henry!
As you note, for any reasonable notion of ‘liberty’, Henry was against it, substituting a perniciously selective notion of ‘liberty’.
See, this is what I don’t get. Why do liberals and leftists (and liberal leftists) keep ceding ‘liberty’ to the business lobby and the libertarians? More generally, why can’t they at least try to reclaim ‘liberty’, ‘hard work’, ‘values’, and all those other things conservatives claim to stand for?
This seems to me to be a vast untapped source of support. Why keep letting the right-wing dictate the terms of public conversation? In particular, the alleged ‘liberty’/’social programs’ trade-off deserves a painful death. Why does it seem that very few or no leftist politicians are willing to touch this?
Makes me angry.
@RJ – Well, I don’t think that I do. And other than people who are really on the fringe of the right, the criticism of surveillance and such come from the left. I also think there is a move afoot to be more outspoken about this. The Republicans really have trapped themselves. They’ve made it clear that [i]un[/i]earned income is more important than earned income. As for family values, let me quote none other than conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru when he was chastising fellow conservatives for saying that Latinos were natural conservatives because they were "hard working, family-oriented, and religious.":
[quote]This line manages to be condescending to Hispanics, self-congratulatory for conservatives, and insulting to non-conservatives. I suspect most people throughout human history have been hard-working, family-oriented, and religious, without sharing conservative views about limited constitutional government.[/quote]
At this point, what does conservatism stand for but "Greed is good!"
Channel that anger, it is righteous!